Is the Licence metadata tag important?

[Phantom_309]

I'm just finishing up a digital clock I made, and I'm just wondering if the "Licence" tag in the metadata is important to fill in? For reference, the assets used to make the clock are not made by me, although they have been edited by me. Thanks.

[jsmorley]

I'm just finishing up a digital clock I made, and I'm just wondering if the "Licence" tag in the metadata is important to fill in? For reference, the assets used to make the clock are not made by me, although they have been edited by me. Thanks.

It's not terribly important that you specify a license in a skin. It's really just sort of a polite thing to do, to let people know what rights they have to modify and / or distribute your skin. Generally, Rainmeter skins are distributed with some flavor of license that allows anyone to use, distribute, modify and base all or part of a skin they write on your work.

Many authors will restrict their skins in only three ways. 1) Some form of credit or attribution to you should be included in any skin they release that is based on your work. 2) Skins based on your work should not be sold for profit. 3) Any skin based on your work should include a license that makes THEIR work have much the same restrictions (or lack thereof).

I find that the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 license does just what I want...

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

At the end of the day, Rainmeter itself is open-source, with almost no restrictions, and we encourage, although not in any way require, that skins written using it be freely shared with the community. To be honest, given that EVERY skin ever written is a derivative of other skins, since that is how everyone learns to use the software, and since there is literally no way to "lock" the source of your skins, any attempt to constrain folks from using what you have done in their own work is pointless.

[Phantom_309]

It's not terribly important that you specify a license in a skin. It's really just sort of a polite thing to do, to let people know what rights they have to modify and / or distribute your skin. Generally, Rainmeter skins are distributed with some flavor of license that allows anyone to use, distribute, modify and base all or part of a skin they write on your work.

Many authors will restrict their skins in only three ways. 1) Some form of credit or attribution to you should be included in any skin they release that is based on your work. 2) Skins based on your work should not be sold for profit. 3) Any skin based on your work should include a license that makes THEIR work have much the same restrictions (or lack thereof).

I find that the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 license does just what I want...

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

At the end of the day, Rainmeter itself is open-source, with almost no restrictions, and we encourage, although not in any way require, that skins written using it be freely shared with the community. To be honest, given that EVERY skin ever written is a derivative of other skins, since that is how everyone learns to use the software, and since there is literally no way to "lock" the source of your skins, any attempt to constrain folks from using what you have done in their own work is pointless.

Thanks for the advice, mate. I'd say that the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 looks pretty decent, and I think i'll go with that one.

[sctanf]

I remember reading somewhere that CC licenses cannot apply to code (except for CC0). What would that mean for Rainmeter? Especially since I see so many skins using a CC license?

[SilverAzide]

I remember reading somewhere that CC licenses cannot apply to code (except for CC0). What would that mean for Rainmeter? Especially since I see so many skins using a CC license?

"Cannot" isn't really the right word. Per the CC website: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software

There's nothing here saying you can't use CC 3.x or 4.x, they just recommend using something else for software. Using CC0 is putting your stuff out into the public domain for anyone to use however they see fit, without attribution, etc.

[Active Colors]

I'm just finishing up a digital clock I made, and I'm just wondering if the "Licence" tag in the metadata is important to fill in? For reference, the assets used to make the clock are not made by me, although they have been edited by me. Thanks.

To what jsmorley has said, when you release your skin just add a note somewhere that the image you used is made by X and edited by you. These kind of things is better to note beforehand and is just showing politeness and respect.

I remember reading somewhere that CC licenses cannot apply to code (except for CC0). What would that mean for Rainmeter? Especially since I see so many skins using a CC license?

When you create a functional skin it is not a "piece of code" anymore, it is an embodiment of your imagination and a creative work, thus, a very piece of art, treat it like a complete baby, and not like a bag of brains, liver, guts, etc.

If people like your skin they will copy some of your components no matter what license you have, as jsmorley mentioned, this is also how people learn things and mostly probably will adopt your ideas. This is how things are naturally working for ages in many areas. In most cases the process is as follows: people examine your skin, remove anything superfluous regarding their vision, take only what is needed for their idea, and now either base their skin around this idea or implement this idea into their working skin; in the end they get completely different skin.

Well if they do release a skin that is merely a copy of your work and you didn't intend that since the copy offers same functionality, that's a different story, and in this case probably "NoDerivatives" license is probably what you need in such a case, especially if you feel like this is a unique skin out there. But you mostly probably cannot license your separate skin code parts or all the rainmeter code you write, nobody is going to limit themselves. Even with external scripts, I doubt somebody can license their LUA script so nobody can use it. In the nature of open source projects, does anyone can fork a project and make their own version from it?